Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ~ Mary Oliver

TBR List Declutter, Issue 22

For me, this November is a month packed with so many fun things. I’m scheduling several weeks in advance, so if something really big happens and I fail to mention it, that’s why. Well, something big besides more books disappearing from my TBR.

Verdict: Go. Until my last book purge, I owned this one. I gave it away because it wasn’t compelling enough to keep it. Also, although I liked Bird by Bird, I did not like Operating Instructions (it’s on my DNF list), and I’m not keen on having the same odds as a coin toss as to whether I’ll like this book or not. I’m forty years old; I need to aim for sure things when it comes to my reading material.

Verdict: Keep. This one seems more accessible, both in its tone and in my ability to locate a copy of it, than Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender (#386 on my TBR). I’ll start with this one, I think, and if I want a more academic take on the subject, I’ll go on to Butler’s book.

Verdict: Go. The premise intrigues me, but I am really, really tired of nonfiction authors inserting themselves into their books. If you don’t have enough to say about a subject without making it about yourself, perhaps you shouldn’t be writing the book. This seems like a rather harsh indictment of a book I haven’t read, but the emphasis on the autobiographical is right in the description, so I have to imagine that it’s a big part of the book, and that kind of thing just rankles me.

Verdict: Go. I remembering adding this to my TBR because it was about the Topaz internment camp in Utah, which wasn’t too far from where I lived for three years. I attended a Buddhist temple in Salt Lake City, and some of the members there were of an age to remember—and perhaps to have experienced—the internment camps. I regret not finding the words to ask about that part of Japanese-American history in Utah. Despite my interest in the subject, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir appeals to me as a more in-depth account of someone who lived the experience.

Project List: n/a

That’s five more titles off the list, for a total of 72 out of 220 (9.6% of the original 750). I hope I’m not cutting too deeply just because I’m going through these ten titles during a bout of insomnia and I’m feeling a bit surly. Meh. If I did cut too much, I have these blog posts to remind me of what I scrapped.

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